Brontë’s hills are alive ...with sex and seances
Emily Cert: 15, 2hrs 10mins ★★★★★
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile Cert: PG, 1hr 46mins ★★★★★
Halloween Ends Cert: 18, 1hr 51mins ★★★★★
All Quiet On The Western Front Cert: 15, 2hrs 27mins Netflix from October 28 ★★★★★
THas Michael passed on his skills to a new disciple ? Or is he waiting to return?
he makers of Emily, a fine new biopic of the writer Emily Brontë, are probably hoping you’ll come out of their film and rush off to read, or reread, her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Me, I came out quietly singing the Kate Bush song of the same name to myself – ‘wuthering, wuthering…’ – and wondering if I could remember that extraordinary dance.
Never mind the moors, there’s certainly something wily and windswept about the Emily Brontë portrayed here by the Franco-British actress Emma Mackey, best known for TV’s Sex Education and Kenneth Branagh’s Death On The Nile. This Emily is stubborn, reclusive and doesn’t like meeting new people… although she might just make an exception when a handsome new curate, Mr Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), arrives in Haworth.
It needs to be stressed that what actress and now film-maker Frances O’Connor has made here is a fictionalised biopic. It takes the few facts that are reliably known about Emily – her two writer sisters, Anne and Charlotte, her wayward brother Branwell, her love of the Yorkshire moors – and then embroiders them with fiction.
What O’Connor is offering is a suggestion of the sort of short life Emily Brontë might have experienced to write a novel as strong, cruel and passionate as Wuthering Heights. At one memorable moment, a family parlour game almost becomes a seance, as Emily’s dark side emerges; at others, she and Branwell do a lot of peeking through windows, just as Cathy’s ghost would at the start of the novel. ‘So co-o-o-old,’ as Bush would sing 130 years later.
But, most controversially, this is an Emily Brontë who discovers sexual passion. Some will say she must have done to write Wuthering Heights, while others will argue that she could just as easily have imagined it.
Either way, the end result is a dark, stylish and authentic-feeling film that adds to our understanding of all three Brontë sisters, has distant echoes of The Piano and seems certain to be among the contenders when British film award season moves properly into gear. Mackey and O’Connor have much to be proud of.
Although the American children’s book on which it is based was published in 1965, I’d never heard of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile. But it was reinvented as a musical in 1987 and now gets a fresh set of songs and a live-action makeover for a new feature-film version, although obviously Lyle – a singing crocodile who lives in a New York attic and suffers from stage fright – remains a computer-generated visual effect.
And maybe that’s why the film never quite takes magical flight, despite some undeniable attractions. Javier Bardem is unexpectedly terrific as the veteran magician desperate for fame and who thinks he might finally find it when he stumbles across a young singing crocodile. And there’s an undeniable charm as the story picks up some years later with Lyle befriending a lonely little boy whose family have just moved to New York.
With the New York setting serving up reminders of both Stuart Little and Clifford The Big Red Dog, and decent songs from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, there’s no doubt Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile will fill a family-friendly, chilly half-term afternoon. But the story feels thin, and whether you’ll be humming a single one of those show tunes a day or two later is a moot point.
It may not have been to everyone’s taste but there’s no doubt that Jamie Lee Curtis delivered one of the iconic performances of her career when she appeared in the original Halloween back in 1978. You know, the one that costarred Donald Pleasence and first introduced us to the insane slasher-killer Michael Myers.
She graced the 1981 sequel and two films marking their 20th anniversary, but then didn’t return to the endless, blood-splattered franchise until 2018, beginning a trilogy that I hope brings the excessively sanguinous series to a final end. The first was surprisingly good, the second was terrible and now the third, Halloween Ends, is… well, decent enough if you like this sort of thing.
Suddenly there is a new killer in the already body-strewn town of Haddonfield, Illinois, but has Myers, ‘the personification of evil’ as Laurie (Curtis) describes him in the book she never quite finishes writing, simply passed on his skills to a new disciple? Or is he lurking in the dark Halloween shadows, waiting to return?
Neither the answer nor the body count will surprise you.
It’s only two-and-a-half years since Sam Mendes’s First World War epic, 1917, was released to acclaim and awards. Which might make you think it’s a little too soon for another film marking the mud and deadly attrition of the Great War.
But the thing about All Quiet On The Western Front, which is based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel and showing a week in cinemas before arriving on Netflix, is that it’s told, with the help of subtitles, from the German perspective.
Felix Kammerer is terrific as Paul Bäumer, the 17-year-old schoolboy who marches off so proudly, only to discover quickly the full horror of war.
But, amid the mud and chaos, it’s difficult keeping up with who’s who, and writer-director Edward Berger takes considerable liberties with Remarque’s quietly poignant ending. Shame.